


Sober Girls

by Darkmagyk



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Bar Room Brawl, F/F, Friends With Benefits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 07:38:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6845386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkmagyk/pseuds/Darkmagyk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kanan was happy to get in a bar fight for a stupid reason.<br/>But a good reason was always preferred.<br/>Hera's honor was a great reason.<br/>The subjugation of an entire gender and species was even better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sober Girls

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a comment [ShannonPhillips](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ShannonPhillips/pseuds/ShannonPhillips) made about Kanan getting into fights when Twi'Lek women are insulted or their sexuality degraded on her fic Fade to Black and Back.
> 
> Content warnings: Sexual harassment, species specific slurs, and an allusion to such harassment happening to minors. Kanan's PTSD and use of alcohol to deal with trauma both also appear.

“Kanan,” The disapproval was unmistakable in Hera’s perfect voice. Kanan knew it well. It was normally directed at her.

And normally, in response, Kanan apologized, or at least had the decency to look sorry.

But today, all she did was toss her best saucy smile over her shoulder, and land a nasty right hook without looking.

Hera hated her saucy smile. Which Kanan didn’t think was really fair. It was useful. She remembers being 16 and practicing it in a boarding house bathroom. It was always nice to get someone else to buy you a drink, and not waste your own money blocking out the pain. Kanan had a lot of pain; it took a lot of booze.

And it still worked.

The guy who was currently trying to wrap his arms around Kanan from behind (ok, succeeding in grabbing Kanan from behind) had been the one to buy the as yet untouched shot on the counter. 

Kanan didn’t much like getting grabbed from behind. It was a common tactic of men who frequented bar fights, but didn’t often fight women in them. They thought that the lack of height and breadth in the shoulders made them easy to lift and move. 

But Kanan knew women who got into bar fights, particularly bipedal women with arms, mostly fell into two categories when faced with this particular move. Kickers, who’d flail until they were impossible to keep hold of, and usually took out a hunk of skin or an eye in the process, and women like her, mostly compact muscle and pent up aggression in small frames and long coats (well, maybe the coat was just her). She also was sure she’d been training to win fights longer than this guy had, even though he had to have seven or eight years on her. 

She planted her feet flat and went as limp as possible in his arms until he had to adjust his grip, and then she was able to shift her weight, move her arms, and find the right leverage. 

With all of her considerable might, she heaved. And the man sailed over her body, flailing his arms, before landing on his friend, who had mostly shaken off the right hook.

Their groans sounded pained, but Kanan wasn’t worried. The human body could take a surprising amount of abuse. She knew that from personal experience, on both sides of the fist. 

Her lip was still bleeding, she could feel the bruise that would from around her eye, and Hera’s disapproving gaze bore into her back. So Kanan did the only thing she could, stood up straight, turned back to the bar, and took the shot that had been ordered for her. 

Some people talked about liquid courage. But Kanan preferred to fight her battles sober, and get fucked up after the fact. Booze was great at numbing the pain, when the fight couldn’t beat it out of you or caused more than it was worth. 

“This was on their tab.” She reminded the Togruta woman pouring drinks, when she was done.

“I remember,” She promised, and her expression was neutral, but her eyes were alight. Men like the saucy smile. Women like to see assholes get their asses handed to them. Kanan never really had to practice that one. It was more on the job training.

“You done?” She threw out to Hera, whose Nabooian bourbon remained untouched. It was a shame. Kanan liked whatever would get her drunk the fastest, and if it stung on the way down, all the better. Hera preferred expensive alcohol, which was one of the reason Kanan had liked the idea of getting someone else to pay for it. 

If it hadn’t been for the tailhead comment, things might have gone ok. And if it hadn’t been for whole _screamer_ thing, the men in question might have left the bar with their pride intact, though possibly short their credits and chonos.

“Kanan,” Hera repeated. Even more displeased.

Kanan shrugged with all the false bravado that had gotten her this far in life. “Suit yourself,” she said, giving the undrunk bourbon a regretful look, as she followed Hera out. 

They trekked back to the Ghost in silence Hera’s icy disposition growing, and Kanan’s swagger rising with every would be wince, as the adrenaline fled her system, and the pain in her eye developed in full. She should have gotten Hera’s drink to go. To dull the sting, and keep the frost at bay.

When they got back to the ship, Chopper made some rude comment that got him shooed away by Hera to run diagnostics about something. While Hera marched her to the makeshift medbay.

Once settled on the thin cot, she didn’t exactly drop her cocksure mask (she didn’t think she had, not for a minute, since she was 15. But some days she felt like she could. Like with Hera it could be ok.) But she doesn’t suppress the wince when Hera touches a cloth to her lip.

“Kanan,” Hera says again, but it's gentler. Less reproaching and more regretful. And not about her, but for her. 

“Just because we’re friends, now.” Friends who fuck, she didn’t say, but Kanan saw her brush her left hand over the outside of her thigh, where Kanan knew she’d sucked a love bite last night, “You can’t do that, You can’t pick fights with a person just because they say disparaging things about Twi’leks. People will say things like that again.”

“And I’ll punch them,” Kanan said with a smile. Not her saucy ‘by me drinks smile,’ nor her ‘come back to my room smile’ but her real, honest, ‘I’m happy’, smile. She felt like she was using it more these days, more than she had in the 7 years before, mostly around Hera. Even if it did kind of hurt her split lip. 

“You can’t punch everyone who thinks that way,” Hera told her, but her normally sagly tone sounded a little condescending about something so obvious. Perfect, but condescending. 

“Well, obviously not,” Kanan agreed, and she could hear the cockiness come, almost second nature, in response to the condescension. She might want to work on that, as far as Hera was concerned. “Just the ones who are stupid enough to say something in front of me.”

“I don’t need you to shield me,” Hera said.

“I know,” Kanan said, “I offered you first swing, you turned it down.” 

“It's not about that. My honor isn’t worth starting a bar fight over.” She gave Kanan a hard look. 

“Hera,” Kanan offered, “I’ve been in a lot of bar fights, for a lot of stupid reasons. Trust me when I say, your honor is definitely worth one.” She’d gotten into one, once, about the color of her boots. And another over space waffles. She knows stupid bar fights. Hera’s frown didn’t lessen, “But, that wasn’t about your honor. It was about assholes disparaging entire groups of women, for no reason. I’m happy to get into a bar fight for a stupid reason, but bar fights for good reasons are much preferred.” 

“So it wasn’t about me?” Hera asked, fist on her hips, looking entirely unconvinced. 

“Of course it was about you,” Kanan said, “but it wasn't _just_ about you. I’d have swung first at them either way.”

“Really?” She looked skeptical. “If those men had said that back in the Asteroid Belt, before we met, I mean. If they were buying you drinks, and then said that, what would you have done? Be honest.”

Kanan resisted the urge to roll her eyes she was always honest (or always lying, from a certain point of view).

“Well, I worked at the Asteroid Belt, so I’d have kicked them out.” She considered it, “hard.” 

“How many fights about Twi’Lek women’s hyper sexualization have you gotten into?” 

“Just Twi’Lek women? Five, I think. Maybe six, depending on your definitions.” 

Hera didn’t look convinced, but she did hand Kanan a cold pack to apply to her eye. 

“Like when? When was the first time?”

Well, that was an easy answer. And the most difficult one.

“When I was a kid, we went on this trip once, for...school.” Hera knew she had been a Jedi, but she didn’t know if Hera knew all that meant, all that entailed. She didn’t know if Hera knew about the Temple, about the younglings or becoming a Padawan. She was struck, suddenly, about how much she wanted to tell her. How much she wanted to share the life story of a little girl name Caleb Dume. 

But the thought of having to speak those words aloud, made her want to vomit. 

“We went to an art gallery. It was a big deal. We basically never got to leave...school.” She swallowed hard at the memory. At the knowledge that her childhood home now housed the throne of a monster.

“We also didn’t get to interact with kids from other, um, schools.” She went on. “But we weren’t the only group there that day. I was the youngest in my clan...uh...class. Because they moved me up a few times, because I was kind of...precocious.” Hera grinned a little at that, like she could picture Kanan as a child. But Kanan kind of doubted she had a picture of Caleb Dume, the Jedi youngling, the little girl with the core accent, who would grow up to be a Jedi Knight, and would ask all the questions it took to get her there. Hera had no way of knowing that child. “But I was about a head shorter than everyone else.” 

“What does that have to do with…”

“In my...class, there was another girl named Sammo and…” Kanan cut her off. 

“That sounds like a Ryloth name.” Hera cut her off in turn. 

“Well,” Kanan shrugged, “Yeah, I assume so, she was a Twi’lek. Anyway, we were at the gallery, and this other group of kids, a little older, came up to us. And they probably thought we were weird.” Because, they had been weird, so very very weird. Kanan hasn’t spent much time around younglings since she’d been one, but she had spent enough time around fairly well adjusted adults to know just how outside of the norm her childhood was. Even in a galaxy full of hundreds of thousands of cultures and child rearing traditions. “But one of them just kept staring at Sammo. And we could all feel how uncomfortable it was making her. And then, he said…” 

Kanan trailed off, she remembered it, clear as day, but she didn’t want to repeat it. Not to Hera, not to anyone. 

“He said some really nasty things. So I did the only thing I could do, I punched him in the nose.” It had made such a satisfying crack, too. Kanan had broken many noses in her time, but that one would always be the best. 

Hera just stared for a moment. Before finally asking “How old were you?”

“Eight.” Kanan said, and winced at that memory too. Eight and short and scrawny. She’d never managed to much in the high departments (even if she was miles from where she’d been then) but she’d managed to build some bulk. 

Hera grinned, “Eight years old and standing up for your friend.” She looked at Kanan for an intense moment. “What happened?”

“With the kid who I punched? No idea.” then she frowned, “With me...I got in trouble, A lot of trouble. A...lot of trouble,” She had never been in that much trouble before, and never got in it again as a Jedi. Getting reprimanded for disrupting class with too many questions wasn’t the same as striking a civilian, off temple grounds, in anger. She remembered, a few days after the incident, had been the first time she’d spoken to Master Babilia alone. At the time she’d been utterly terrified. It was strange to look back on it as a happy memory, of her master talking about anger and injustice and how to handle it all. She wasn’t sure the lesson had stuck. But it hovered around her sometimes, a reminder of the Jedi way and the Kanan way, the Caleb way, even. Useful. Right behind her when she needed it. 

_I’ll be right behind you._

It was over and gone in a flash, but for a second she was 14 and on Kaller, being told to run. And leaving her master behind. 

“Kanan.”

And no, that wasn’t right. That wasn’t her name.

“Kanan.” 

She blinked. And then stared at Hera, who stared back with wide, green, beautiful eyes. 

_This_ was why she didn’t reminisce. (This is why she doesn’t drop the mask, even in front of Hera.)

“Are you ok?” Hera asked. 

Kanan grinned, “Other than the black eye and the split lip, never been better.” 

Hera frowned for a moment, and then smiled, It was small, but genuine. 

“My hero.” She cooed in exaggeration, and Kanan’s grin became her real smile too. “I’ve never seen anyone flip a person over themselves, while using the body as a projectile before.”

“No?”

“Nope,” She leaned closer, dabbing at the split lip again, while her other hand went up and wound itself in the short, spikey hair at the back of her head. “It was one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen.”

Kanan kind of doubted that. But then again. Hera was 18, and had spent most of her life trying to fight an empire. She likely hadn’t seen the porn Kanan had. Or been to the surprisingly high number of sex dungeons dotting the outer rim. 

So maybe she won by default. 

Regardless, she set the cooling pack down, and pulled Hera in for a kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> Check out my [tumblr](http://darkmagyk.tumblr.com/).


End file.
